Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette Kelly Steelman addresses a mix of Michigan Tech faculty and staff and community leaders at the Inaugural Essential Education Symposium Wednesday. The group collaborated together in this session to discuss how they can form courses which tie more directly to the U.P.

HOUGHTON — Michigan Tech held the inaugural Essential Education Symposium at the Memorial Union Building Wednesday to introduce the new general education program to the university’s faculty, staff and community organization members. Attendees participated in multiple sessions which explained what the new program will entail and gave organizers important feedback as well as new ideas.

Michigan Tech’s Essential Education Program replaces the old model of general education and will seek to bring more overlap and connections between all classes. The program was conceived through the 21st Century Tech Forward Initiative by the University’s IDEAhub.

Kelly Steelman, chair of psychology and Human factors and IDEAhub co director said the previous format could have had students feeling pulled away from the subjects they came to study.

“Part of the goal of a university is not just to prepare people for careers, but to prepare them to be citizens of the world,” Steelman said. “And so part of our goal in the development of the new program was to really help students see the value of these classes and to make it more obvious to them what skills they’re building in these kinds of different places. So if they include things that welcome challenge, communicating contextually, something kind of unique to Michigan Tech, communicating quantitatively about and using numbers and data all of the kind of courses in the curriculum are aligned with these essential abilities.”

The university has also created Essential Education Minors, which can be completed to satisfy a portion of the Essential Education program. Included in these are subjects such as sustainability, entrepreneurship, human centered design and A.I. ethics.

“One of the things that we heard from students, is they didn’t really see the connections between maybe a social science, a humanities and the STEM class that they were taking. And so this is a way to kind of help tie these together,” Steelman said.

The symposium’s keynote speaker was Shane Sutherland, cofounder and CEO of PebblePad which will be incorporated as an online portfolio and platform allowing students to keep reflections on their education. Things such as photos, videos and graphics can accompany the entries. Sutherland introduced the product to those in attendance and conveyed how it can be utilized.

One of the symposium’s sessions was the Community Partner and Faculty Mixer, which gave the opportunity for community leaders to interact with University faculty and generate ideas of how collaborations can benefit students, the university and local communities.

The session was led by Keweenaw Community Foundation Director of Programs Erin Barnett and Essential Education Experience Manager Cassandra Reed-VanDam and included groups and organizations such as Carnegie Museum of the Keweenaw, Keweenaw Land Trust, the City of Hancock, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and more.

“We thought that having this workshop at the Symposium is a great way to not only inform our community partners about the new [Essential Education] program, but also to have them in the same room with faculty to design these courses,” Reed-VanDam said.

The mixer immediately produced collaborations. “There’s a faculty member that’s exploring the possibility of developing an environmental sustainability plan related to emergency services up in Keweenaw County,” Barnett said. “There’s a historical group that’s going to partner with the Park Service to create a traveling exhibit about historical sites in Keweenaw so it wouldn’t be just at the Park Service. Another group is talking about having students develop STEM kits for K-12 students, where they could come to a local nonprofit, put together the curriculum and these kits together, and then younger children could check those kits out and do STEM projects at home.”